The annual April in Santa Cruz Festival (AiSC) returns in 2025 with UC Santa Cruz graduate students, faculty and guest artists.

On April 25, Music Department Professor Ben Leeds Carson joins UCSC D.M.A. program composers Forrest Balman, Nina Barzegar, Michael Fleming, Dohyun Jeon, and Maisha Lani to present a range of duos, trios, and quartets, to be played by combinations among four musicians. Siamak Barghi performs on the Persian hand-drum, the tonbak, and Arya Tavallaei on the Persian dulcimer, the santour. They are joined by two members of the transculturally focused San Francisco-based Del Sol Quartet (Charlton Lee and Kathryn Bates), whose decade-old performing careers have developed an international reputation for collaboration with traditional Central Asian instrumentalists, among others. Barghi and Barzegar explore Mesopotamian and Persian antiquity in various ways; their collaboration with Bates and Lee is informed by mixtures of Korean, Central Asian, and Western practices.
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ADMISSION
- FREE and open to the public
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PARKING
- Parking by permit, ParkMobile, or $5 cash/credit via the on-site parking attendant 
- Arts Lot #126 is the closest parking lot to the event
- Visitors with DMV placards or plates may park for free in DMV spaces, Medical spaces, or ParkMobile spaces without additional payment, or in timed zones for longer than the posted time.
- More information provided by UCSC Transportation & Parking Services (TAPS) 
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ABOUT THE FESTIVAL
April in Santa Cruz is a decades-old tradition of intrepid music-making, and has featured a global vanguard of musical practices, interacting with local as well as international composers and performers. This year's festival is a dynamic trans-cultural symposium of musical collaboration, which focuses its attention on performing artists whose practices challenge colonial models of music notation and the domination of Western practices in music performance. 
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FULL SCHEDULE OF EVENTS
- Friday, April 18, 7:30 p.m.: Concert 1
- Saturday, April 19, 6:00 p.m.: Concert 2—"Tenanan"
- Friday, April 25, 7:30 p.m.: Concert 3